“Sometimes I wish I could disappear,” I told Father Elton once while I was doing the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises last year.

“Of course you do,” he said. “You want to do as you were told.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“That memory you had of yourself as a toddler, when you were crying and your sibling squeezed your cheeks…”

The image returned in full force: I’m sitting on the couch with my mother beside me. She is holding our baby brother, and my four-year-old sister and six-year-old brother are in front of me. They’re angry. One of them squeezes my cheeks together so hard I feel the flesh pressed against my teeth. I hear: Be quiet! Nobody asked you to be here.

I inhaled deeply and returned to the present, to Father Elton’s kind eyes and safe words.

“You were expected not to exist, something you couldn’t do,” he said.

“But I keep trying.”

I remember the first time I was tempted by the delicious desire to disappear. I felt drawn to float away into an imaginary black hole where nothing was expected of me.

But under that temptation is a deeper desire: the desire to be heard, welcomed and comforted, the desire to be real and accepted.

These are desires God longs to fill and prayer opens up a way for God to do it. That is why Ignatius asked “retreatants”* to spend an hour a day fully present to God.

Each morning I would sit on the couch in my study and ask for the grace I needed to pray with a gospel story and imagine myself in it with Jesus. Then I talked with Jesus about what I saw or felt and listened to his response.

I met with Father Elton weekly and shared what I had experienced in that dedicated time of prayer. “Jesus never seems to get tired of showing me how precious I am to him,” I told Father Elton more than once.

Every time I did, he smiled and nodded, as if he could see me materializing before his very eyes.

Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
– Psalm 37:4 (NIV)

*

Questions for your Lenten pilgrimage:

• Are you carrying a painful image from your past?
• Is there someone kind and safe you could share it with?

* “Retreatants” are people participating in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, either as a 30-day retreat or for one hour a day over the course of seven or eight months.

Credits:
“Disappear” by SIMindy. Used with permission.

© Esther Hizsa, An Everyday Pilgrim 2014
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without permission from Esther Hizsa is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used provided there is a link to the original content and credit is given as follows: © Esther Hizsa, An Everyday Pilgrim 2013, 2014  http://www.estherhizsa.wordpress.com.